The Ice Planet

In a very special edition of Rum Doings, we are joined by comedy writer John Finnemore. We have discussed Mr Finnemore’s work on Rum Doings in the past, especially the fantastic Radio 4 sitcom Cabin Pressure. He’s worked on very many radio and television comedies, perhaps most notably as a lead writer for Mitchell & Webb on both Radio 4 and BBC 2, and despite this still agreed to join us for our twentieth episode.

There’s a topic not under discussion this week too: how are we going to inoculate ourselves against Britain’s road rage epidemic.

You’ll not be surprised to learn much of the topics this week are radio and TV comedy – subjects we’ve spoken about a great deal before. We begin with Cabin Pressure, and quickly move on to the sitcoms that inspired Finnemore, especially Yes Minister. Then find out which surprising 70s sitcom David Mitchell is a fan of, as well as enjoy a brief dissection of The Fall And Rise Of Reginald Perrin. Nick attempts to get John W in trouble, telling tales about his disliking of Fawlty Towers, and then everything goes horribly wrong…

Finnemore defends Victoria Wood’s ‘dinnerladies’. Oh dear. It all falls apart. It almost comes to blows.

Fortunately we quickly move on to John Shuttleworth, good comedy we can all agree on. This takes us to Dad’s Army, which in turn brings us back to Cabin Pressure, especially the desert episode and the fantastic appearance of John Sessions. Nick then launches into a brilliant attempt to tell Finnemore that he’s wrong about the nature of one of his own characters – one he even voices himself. This leads to a lovely discussion of the nature of happiness, as viewed through the Goons.

After more discussion of Cabin Pressure, then talk of the relationship between The Mitchell & Webb Sound and Look, we arrive at the topic of comedians doing advertising. Then changing from commercials to the other side, there’s talk of why the BBC is such a great thing but so desperately lacking self-confidence.

Huge thanks to John Finnemore for joining us for our twentieth episode. We strongly recommend you get hold of Cabin Pressure. It’s a funny and warm radio sitcom of the like that’s very rare today. You can buy both series from Audible here and here, or from iTunes here and here. Oh, and we should probably add that you can hear Finnemore on this week’s episode of The Now Show, 6.30, Friday on Radio 4. Yes, we’re aware of the irony of this.

Do let other people know about this episode, by whichever means you think best. And writing a review on iTunes helps us a great deal. We’d appreciate it.

If you want to email us, you can do that here.

To get this episode directly, right click and save here. To subscribe to Rum Doings click here, or you can find it in iTunes here.

by John Walker at March 10, 2010 12:49 PM

Daily Mail, 8 March 2010

Almost every day now, fresh claims are surfacing in the media about why Jon Venables, one of the pair who murdered toddler James Bulger, has broken the terms of his licence and been sent to prison.

The latest is that he was involved in some kind of sexual offence, possibly relating to child pornography.

There are also reports that he had been meddling with drugs, as well as claims that he and his fellow killer Robert Thompson were given kid-glove treatment while in their secure children’s institutions.

But as the pressure mounts upon the Government to reveal what Venables did, I find myself torn about how to respond. Yes, there are crucial considerations of justice. But there are also issues of compassion and proportionality.

And I am troubled by what appears to be a lynch-mob mentality fuelling some of this tumult. What struck me so forcibly during the trial of Thompson and Venables in 1993 was that, right from the start, people seemed to be reluctant to acknowledge that they were, in fact, just children.

Yes, their crime in abducting, torturing and bludgeoning two-year-old James to death was abominable.

Yes, the agony of his mother Denise is, indeed, a life sentence. But Thompson and Venables were ten years old when they murdered James. If they had been a few months younger, they would have been deemed too young to have been dealt with by the criminal justice system at all.

Yet they were attacked as if they were grown men with an adult responsibility for their actions. They were labelled as ‘evil’ and ‘monsters’. I remember the mob hammering on the prison van as it transported them to and from court.

Few could doubt that, if it had had the chance, that maddened crowd would have torn those children limb from limb. To shudder at such scenes is not to be soft-headed about those who do terrible deeds.

It is to recognise that the whole point of a justice system is to rise above such primitive passions and transmute the desire for vengeance into due process of law.

Because Thompson and Venables were children whose behaviour was rooted in their catastrophic family backgrounds, it was thought possible effectively to reprogramme them to become socially responsible individuals by looking after them in secure children’s institutions.

The point about children is that they are immature and still developing. There is a chance that, with skilled intervention to counter the effects of years of neglect or abuse, they might be diverted from the appalling trajectory of crime and violence which would otherwise be their inevitable fate.

It is surely only humane and civilised to make such an attempt. Not to do so is to have the bleakest possible view of human nature, not to mention a brutal approach to children.

Equally, however, it may not be possible to rescue some individuals who have been irreparably damaged. Clearly, those who have committed such terrible crimes should not be released until it is certain that this is not the case.

But, in the case of Venables, a crucial mistake was made which prevented such an assessment. He was let out of custody too early.

If the decision of the then Home Secretary Michael Howard that the pair should spend at least 15 years in custody had not been overturned by the courts as ‘institutionalised vengeance’, they would not have been released until they were 25.

As it was, they were released at 18, the age at which, if kept in custody, they would have had to enter an adult prison.

And that was something the judges were desperate to avoid. With the settled conviction — now the default position in the higher judiciary — that prison does only harm, it was feared that it would undo all the good work that had been done with Thompson and Venables.

This meant that Venables was released before anyone could be sure that his profoundly damaged early childhood had not resulted in a profoundly damaged man.

Until the moment he was jailed for breaching his licence, we had no idea that such a mistake had been made because of the secrecy in which he and Thompson had been held.

This is because, if the attempt to reprogramme such children is to have any chance of succeeding — not to mention the need to protect their physical safety — they need to be shielded from scrutiny. Which is why they were given new identities.

Ministers’ refusal to say why Venables was jailed a week ago — other than that the allegations against him were ‘extremely serious’ — is based on the assertion that to reveal the details might prejudice a future trial for the new offences.

But since faced with a 27-year-old defendant charged with these offences a jury would probably put two and two together anyway, that argument seems flawed. More pertinent is the fear that any such details might well blow his cover, exposing him to a serious risk of attack, whether in prison or out.

Those who respond ‘So what?’ must acknowledge that they don’t care if Venables is killed. That is the cry of the lynch mob. It is effectively to outsource capital punishment by extra-judicial means.

And yet, on the other hand, this secrecy is far from desirable. First, we have every right to know the way in which taxpayers’ money is being spent on the treatment of criminals.

More pertinently, such secrecy allows incompetence to flourish. It means we have no way of knowing whether the treatment of young offenders is going wrong; no way of holding childcare or psychiatric professionals — whose record hardly inspires much confidence - to account.

Now the authorities are in a mess. The knowledge that Venables has been jailed for breaching his licence means that people in prison are likely to work out his identity. So he needs to be given yet another one.

But now we read that Venables is blowing his own cover, blurting out his name in prison because he can no longer cope with the pressure of living a lie.

It’s hard to avoid concluding that secrets have an awful tendency to blow up in your face. No good ever comes of a lie; and such secrecy is a lie about identity.

And yet, and yet… It is said that Mary Bell, who was convicted in 1968 of the manslaughter of two little boys when she herself was a child, has led a responsible and settled life since her release under a new identity.

Again, we have no way of confirming this. But if it is true, then undoubtedly the protection of Bell’s identity has enabled that particular deeply damaged child to be redeemed. Yet it has to be said that her crimes took place in a different era.

It’s not that what she did wasn’t seen to be as shocking as the murder of James Bulger 25 years later. But Bell, who was found to have diminished responsibility, was seen as a true aberration by a society in which the brutal killing of a child by a child seemed utterly incomprehensible.

It’s hard to avoid the unpalatable conclusion that the extreme demonisation of Thompson and Venables has arisen in large measure because the boundaries of civilised behaviour — particularly in terms of epidemic family disintegration and extreme violence at ever-younger ages — have been fracturing far more widely.

The hysteria provoked by the killers of James Bulger is thus all the more extreme because their crimes have held up a terrible mirror to society.

While the Venables debacle poses a difficult dilemma about secrecy in the criminal justice system, it is what this whole affair says about our modern age that is perhaps the most disturbing aspect of all.

by Melanie Phillips at March 08, 2010 11:36 AM

From the Observer

A culture that prefers fast food to home-cooked meals and Twenty20 cricket to five-day Tests cannot endure the long haul of political struggle. Boredom sets in. Fickle eyes flick away. “Been there, done that,” we say, a crass cliche at the best of times that turns delusional when we apply it to a political world in which very few causes are done within a decade, let alone a news cycle.

For those who like their gratification instant, no story appeared more satisfying than the campaign to give Gurkha soldiers the right to settle in Britain. The plot was so pat Richard Curtis could have directed it. A legal action, initiated by London solicitors Howe & Co, to compel the government to grant residency rights to some of the 36,000 soldiers who had retired before 1997 provided the backstory. The audience joined the action in April last year, when Nick Clegg demanded that Parliament do what the judges could not. He thundered at Gordon Brown: “If someone is prepared to die for this country, surely they deserve to live in this country?” David Cameron said the same, but Brown failed to listen or understand the public mood.

Even voters who denounced immigration were on the Gurkhas‘ side, reasoning that if Britain let in people who hated it, the government should not bar those who had fought for it. In Joanna Lumley, the Gurkhas had a formidable champion. The daughter of Major James Lumley of the 6th Gurkha Rifles served her family’s regiment well by confronting Phil Woolas, Labour’s immigration minister, at the BBC. She was glamorous and filled with righteous anger. She looked down on Woolas, a careworn and equivocating politician in an ill-fitting suit, and wiped the floor with him.

Her commanding performance was too much…

Read the whole thing

by Nick Cohen at March 07, 2010 10:09 AM

Mark Thompson is jumping from the second storey because he fears a new government may throw him from the roof Published in the Guardian...

March 03, 2010 10:16 PM

Episode 19 is here. This week’s topic isn’t: Why are we English too ASHAMED to celebrate St. George’s Day with due dignity and respect, properly? Which is embarrassing to even type.

Things more realistically begin with an explanation of the spiteful nature of tea, pet names for pets, and that which we’ve changed from hating to liking. Find out what temperature we’ve decided will keep your babies alive, and how John disagrees with all baby-based wisdom, leading to Nick denying his daughter her wings.

Of course we talk about Mr Blobby, and Noel’s House Party, and the Late Late Breakfast Show. But you’d been expecting that. And find out who electrocuted an elephant to death. Hear Nick play the mouth-banjo. Don’t hear Nick tell his Oxford interview story. But do hear stories of examinations.

This takes us back to school days, remembering teachers good and bad, and times we went out of our way to get in trouble. And then, more positively, favourite teachers.

There’s a few things we ask for in return for this lovely gift. Could you retweet about it, demand people on forums have a listn, or find any other way to tell new people to listen? And writing a review on iTunes helps us a great deal. We’d appreciate it.

To get this episode directly, right click and save here. To subscribe to Rum Doings click here, or you can find it in iTunes here.

by John Walker at March 03, 2010 01:54 PM

Seems like it’s fun to post this while it’s still under 200k views, but in a larger part because this is a celebration of a victory over EMI, with the video being embeddable. To find out why that matters, see here. Meanwhile, this is absolutely astonishing, whether the cut after the blue curtains is terrible or not. Cheers to Kim for alerting me.

by John Walker at March 03, 2010 02:09 AM

NICK COHEN
Standpoint
March 2010

Illustration by Miles Cole

THERE ARE NO frontier posts on the Left of politics, no pale to go beyond. You can move further and further away from the centre, move so far, in fact, that you turn the circle and join the fascists and it still doesn’t matter. Whatever you do, your “leftist” credentials will protect you from criticism, as surely as a Foreign Office passport protected British colonists in the age of empire.

The borders of politics’ right flank are better policed. When David Cameron allied himself with nativist Polish and Latvian parties which were not fascist but possessors of Eastern Europe’s traditional difficulties with Jews, liberal journalists, your correspondent included, pounded him. If he had gone further and spoken at a conference that featured prominent neo-Nazis, we would have destroyed him. Honourable critics would not say that Cameron was a neo-Nazi. We would allege instead that he was indifferent to racial conspiracy theories, misogyny and homophobia and the damage they wrought — a self-interested, small-minded politician who could not see that some ideologies were so poisonous that society must confront and quarantine them. Think what you will about Cameron, but he is never going to go that far. One of the most cheering developments in British politics has been the emergence of conservative anti-fascism in Britain led by Nothing British about the BNP and the Centre for Social Cohesion. Conservatives and liberals alike police the pale of right-wing politics while the Left remains an unguarded land wide open to invasion.

The Conservatives’ main complaint about the borderless Left used to be that it allowed huge double standards. Polite society embraced ex- or actual communists and Trotskyists and treated them with a consideration they would have never extended to ex- or actual Nazis. (The Mosleys are the one exception I can think of to this rule. Mainly for snobbish reasons forelock-tugging biographers and television producers hailed Sir Oswald as a Keynesian avant la lettre and Lady Diana as a brilliant star in that ever-twinkling constellation of Mitford sisters.) The old hypocrisy about left-wing totalitarianism irritates many but no longer matters, because communism died in the 1980s. The refusal of 21st-century left-wing and liberal opinion to separate itself from radical Islam is, however, a living disgrace with disastrous consequences for Europe.

You can see them everywhere if you are willing to look. In January, for instance, Harriet Harman and Ed Miliband attended a “Progressive London” conference packed with the supporters of the Muslim Brotherhood, which believes in the establishment of a totalitarian theocracy. George Galloway, who saluted the courage of Saddam Hussein, was there too, inevitably, as was Tariq Ramadan, the shifty academic who thinks there should only be a “moratorium” on the stoning to death of adulterous women rather than an outright ban. Imagine the fuss if, say, William Hague and Michael Gove had gone to a conference on the future of right-wing politics in London and joined members of the BNP, a far-right politician who had saluted the courage of Augusto Pinochet and an academic who argued for a “moratorium” on black immigration to Britain. The BBC would have exploded. It, along with everyone else, kept quiet, of course, about Harman and Miliband because they were from the Left and therefore could never be beyond the pale.

Nominally left-wing politicians’ appeasement of religious reactionaries is so routine that it takes a convulsive event to reveal the extent of liberal perfidy. The reaction of University College London to the news that its alumnus Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab had tried to blow up a plane over Detroit on Christmas Day should have provided the shock therapy. The connection between British-bred extremism and mass murder was there for all to see, except that the authorities did not want to look.

Carry on reading. Subscription required.

by Nick Cohen at March 02, 2010 11:15 AM

The Australian, 2 March 2010

The British Tories are in a state of finger-gnawing nerves. With Gordon Brown’s Labour government in terminal meltdown, the Conservatives should be on course for a landslide victory at this year’s general election.

In fact, their poll ratings have dropped dangerously into hung parliament territory.

While some believe the quirks of Britain’s electoral system may deliver the Tories victory in the end, there is no doubt that they are losing support overall.

The lesson they surely need to learn is staring them in the face in Australia. This is the remarkable rise of Tony Abbott, on the apparently improbable platform of opposing man-made global warming theory and the policies this entails.

Indeed, that Abbott is snapping at Kevin Rudd’s heels demonstrates a crucial lesson for conservatives everywhere. This is the truly astounding fact that a conservative will most likely win power by remaining unambiguously true to conservative principles.

To Tory leader David Cameron and his inner circle of liberal modernisers, such a view would be proof of a pitiable absence of political sophistication. Their strategy of ‘hope and change’ is based on their unshakeable belief that the Tories were denied power for the past 13 years because they were not progressive enough.

Accordingly, they rebranded themselves by taking left-wing, socially liberal positions and, in particular, a wholesale embrace of the environmental agenda.

Alas for the new green Tories, man-made global warming theory has gone spectacularly belly-up. More fundamentally still, Cameron has made a strategic error. He wants to tell the country it’s ‘time for a change’, but the change he has implanted in people’s minds is that the Conservatives are more similar to Labour.

At the same time, he is keen to pacify his increasingly unhappy right wing. The result has been mounting incoherence.

He appeared to retreat over his long-proposed tax advantages for marriage, then restated the policy; now he has supported a campaign to end the stereotyping of single mothers.

He endorsed a smaller state, but supported Labour’s ruinous public spending targets; he then proposed purportedly deep cuts to public spending to reduce the deficit that weren’t deep at all, before retreating to more modest economies still. He proposes allowing householders to kill burglars in cold blood, even if they are running away, yet he countenances cuts to Britain’s defence budget.

By contrast, Abbott took a clear and firm position on global warming against conventional wisdom, and called it right. He even ventured into the lethal minefield of sexual mores, telling a journalist he advised his three daughters not to give themselves away carelessly.

Abbott is scoring so well for two main reasons. First, he is expressing views that are in tune with what so many think but are too intimidated to express. He is a champion of the voiceless mainstream.

Perhaps even more crucially, everyone can see he speaks from principle, and it is no accident that this is securely rooted in his Catholic faith. He is therefore clearly a leader.

By contrast, the British Cameroons appear to be opportunists slavishly following whatever the latest focus group tells them. People need to know where they are with their leaders, even if they don’t agree with everything they say. But there is no courage or consistency in going with the flow.

Moreover, what all successful politicians instinctively understand is that most people are conservative. What Cameron crucially failed to grasp about Tony Blair was that he won power by appealing to a conservative yearning for social order and tranquillity.

So why are the British Conservatives in such a muddle? Their plight reflects a confusion besetting conservatives everywhere.

Conservatism is not an ideology but a cast of mind that seeks to defend what is valuable. That means in the West defending liberal democratic ideas and the Judeo-Christian precepts on which these depend.

With the defeat of communism, many conservatives really believed this was the ‘end of history’. Since everyone embraced the free market, they thought there was no longer anything to defend.

They couldn’t have been more wrong. The battleground had simply moved from economics to culture, with an onslaught against normative moral values, national identity and Western civilisation itself.

But British Conservatives don’t grasp that a culture war is being waged for the soul and future of the West. As a result, they have put themselves to a large extent on the wrong side of that war by jumping on to the progressive bandwagon.

Thus they support gay adoption and all-female political short lists, are nervous about discussing mass immigration or egalitarianism, and are all but silent about Islamism and the Orwellian moral inversion that tries to criminalise as ‘Islamophobia’ the legitimate concerns about radical Islam.

The great battles today are not between left and right. They are between morality and nihilism, truth and lies, justice and injustice, freedom and totalitarianism, and Judeo-Christian values and the would-be destroyers of the West both within and without.

If conservatives are not on the right side of all these touchstone issues, then what is the point of conservatives at all? Why should anyone vote for them if they are merely left-wing wannabes? If people want utopia and the repression that inevitably follows its pursuit, the party to vote for is Labour: it does it so much better.

Moreover, one of the dirty little secrets of the Left is that, far from being the voice of the downtrodden, its agenda has tremendous appeal to the rich.

Green politics in particular provides painless radicalism; it lets people believe they are acting out of high-minded conscience without causing themselves any more pain than cycling to work and recycling their rubbish.

By contrast, the decent working class and lower middle class who have no moneyed leisure for such self-indulgent frivolities are naturally conservative. And the most successful Australian politicians have understood this key fact.

The main reason for John Howard’s four election wins and 11 years as prime minister was his capture of the blue-collar vote from the Labor Party, especially voters in Sydney’s west and their counterpart in other capitals.

He did this by standing up against the Left through initiatives such as dropping multiculturalism, strengthening border protection and refusing to apologise to the Aborigines for the so-called Stolen Generations.

Now Abbott is once again appealing to the people Howard scooped up so effectively. These are the same kind of people the British Conservatives have abandoned. That’s why Abbott is on a roll while the British Tories wonder why they are floundering. They should raise their eyes from their collective navel and look 15,000 km away for the answer.

by Melanie Phillips at March 01, 2010 03:20 PM

Daily Mail, 1 March 2010

Once again, the alarm is being sounded over family disintegration and the apparently unstoppable rise of lone parenthood and mass fatherlessness.

Support for marriage looks set to become an election issue. The Catholic Church is publishing a report this week urging people to consider marriage and the family when deciding where to place their vote.

The issue could not be more urgent.

Devastating new research by sociologist Geoff Dench shows that not only is one in four mothers single, but more than half of such mothers have never lived with a man at all and are choosing to live alone on state benefits. They believe they have no need for a man in their life and that their children have no need for a father.

The founding premise of the Government’s £280million sex education strategy — that young mums get pregnant through ignorance — is thus very far from the truth.

It is, therefore, hardly surprising that Britain still has the highest teenage pregnancy rate in Europe.

In the light of this deeply troubling record, eyebrows were raised at the weekend by prize-winning author Hilary Mantel, who claimed that girls are ready to have babies when they are 14 years old.

With so much flailing around over the family, I have a modest proposal to help break through the confusion.

It is that the Government should introduce a Man Benefit.

Before people assume that I have confused today’s date with this time next month, let me say that my somewhat light-hearted proposal is based on a deeper point that I believe has been generally overlooked.

This is that the most important force behind elective lone parenthood is not ‘ feckless’ men, but the attitude of women and girls.

It is the way they think about their interests which drives the pattern of relationships between the sexes. And they have simply changed their opinion of where their interests lie.

Back in the mists of time before the Pill, all-women short-lists and Harriet Harman, relationships between men and women were based on a bargain between the sexes which, although never stated openly, everyone accepted as a given.

Women realised they needed the father of their children to stick around to help bring them up. In turn, men committed themselves to the mothers of their children on the basis that they could trust they were indeed the father because the woman was sexually faithful.

Today, this bargain has been all but destroyed. A number of factors have conspired to make women and girls think they can go it alone without men.

The first has been that so many women work and are therefore economically independent. Next was the sexual revolution which saw women becoming as sexually free as men.

In short order, any stigma over having babies out of wedlock was abolished. Then there was the collapse of manufacturing industry, which deprived many boys of the job prospects which once made them an attractive, marriageable proposition.

Finally, the coup de grace was administered by welfare benefits to single mothers which enabled them to live without the support of their babies’ fathers.

The result of all this was that many women and girls decided they no longer needed their children’s fathers to be part of the family unit.

This has given rise to an increasing number of women-only households where fathers have been written out of the family script for three or four generations or more.

The consequences of such family disintegration — as is now indisputable — are in general catastrophic for both individuals and for society.

This problem will not be cracked, however, unless women come to believe once again that their interests lie in attracting one man to father their children and then stick with them. Which is where my proposal of a Man Benefit comes in.

At a meeting last week of the Centre for Policy Studies to discuss Dench’s research, the veteran anti-poverty campaigner Frank Field came up with an inventive suggestion to counter the catastrophic impact of joblessness among young men at the bottom of the heap.

He suggested that the state should pay a dowry to couples who undertook to stay together, and that this dowry should be paid to the girl in such a relationship.

It seemed to me, though, that girls already have a kind of dowry in the form of Child Benefit, paid to mothers on the birth of every child — a dowry with a destructive effect.

For the great unsayable is that Child Benefit acts as a huge incentive to have children outside marriage.

When it was introduced in the Seventies, it replaced child tax allowances, which were set against the earned income of fathers. It was, therefore, hailed as a transfer of family income ‘from wallet to purse’.

This was considered a great advance, on the grounds that men were universally irresponsible and would spend any welfare money on drink, while women were entirely responsible and would spend it as intended on the needs of their children.

But the greatest need children have is for their two parents to bring them up. And what few anticipated was that, along with the impact of all the other social and economic changes, some women used Child Benefit to help junk men altogether as superfluous to requirements.

Since marriage has always helped turn young men into responsible adults, this marginalisation gave them a green light to be as irresponsible as they wanted - thus creating a vicious circle in which girls would dismiss these wastrel youths as a ‘waste of space’.

What’s needed, therefore, is to help turn men once again into an attractive, marriageable proposition.

The most important thing they need is, of course, a job — which is why the policy of pushing lone mothers out to work is actually disastrous, particularly in areas of high unemployment.

But welfare must stop reinforcing the idea that men are dispensable. The best way of underpinning marriage is probably through transferable tax allowances for married couples.

David Cameron’s renewed commitment yesterday to recognise marriage somehow in the tax system is welcome — although his suggestion that he will support unmarried couples in the benefits system is troublingly incoherent.

But in addition, my modest proposal is that men who marry for the first time might be given a state ‘dowry’ to increase their worth to women.

Such a Man Benefit would also send a powerful signal that men are not worthless creeps but are essential to family life — which would in turn help address their demoralisation and consequent irresponsible behaviour.

The undoubted expense of such measures would be more than offset by reducing the astronomical cost to this country of family breakdown.

By themselves, of course, any such financial initiatives wouldn’t stop the rot. The main drivers of family breakdown are cultural, not economic; they emanate, moreover, from the intelligentsia at the very top of society even though their worst victims are at the very bottom.

It is those limousine liberals who developed the core idea behind the recalibration of women’s interests — that equality meant women should behave in exactly the same way as men.

This would have appalled the earliest feminists, who fought for votes for women on the basis that women stood for moral constraints that would civilise the public sphere.

The irony is that, as a result of modern notions of gender equality, it is men who now need special help to restore the sexual bargain that will not just benefit the male sex but stop the degradation of women and family life that so threatens us all.

by Melanie Phillips at March 01, 2010 01:03 PM

So yes, I’m doing H again, but that’s because I just discovered How To Make It In America. So there it is. There’s the notable exception of It’s Always Sunny In Philadelphia below. It’s a brilliant show and I’m seasons behind. I’ll eventually catch up, because it’s always worth watching. But I haven’t, and don’t have anything relevant to say about it.

If you read nothing else in this post, please watch the video under Leverage. It’s four minutes that won’t be wasted.

How To Make It In America – HBO

To describe it this sounds like every first-year student TV writing project. Two guys who live on the edge of a criminal lifestyle, yet somehow hanging out on the elite New York partying scene, swearing at each other and attracting all who pass by. Yet the delivery changes a lot. The cast is strong (Luis Guzmán being reliably menacing alongside the younger, prettier crowd), and it’s occasionally aesthetically inspired. The direction is smart, and with a fantastic soundtrack (helpfully documented on the show’s site), its presentation helps cover gaps the perhaps not stunningly original themes may leave. The second scene of the first episode, pulling back to reveal Victor Rasuk standing on the back of a bicycle ridden by a Hasidic Jewish boy, outlines the smart wit. “Stay strong, He-brew.”

It’ll be interesting to see if the guys-struggling-to-keep-up-with-the-scene story is strong enough to sustain. In terms of story theme it feels like it falls halfway between the astonishing Bored To Death and the atrocious Entourage. There’s a tendency for the characters to speak in speeches, which feels a shame in a show that would benefit from a more naturalistic delivery. The heavy script of Bored To Death works so well because it’s so spectacularly refined, but here it seems to be holding things back somewhat. People don’t say, “He who hesitates masturbates!” and then twinkle their eyes. And perhaps they didn’t need the drunk guy shouting to his ex-girlfriend from the street scene immediately. Or someone complaining about being woken up and pulling the pillow over their head… But wow, the soundtrack helps me forgive a lot.

In Treatment – HBO

Season 1 of In Treatment was probably one of the most masterful television programmes ever made. Season 2 started off matching it. I didn’t finish it. I had to stop. Its hopeless misery combined with something I struggle to cope with: impending doom. Impending doom is something I find very off-putting in all formats – it’s about the inevitable awfulness that’s to come and there’s nothing I can do to stop it. I recognise this as my own madness, but watching In Treatment was putting me on the verge of an anxiety attack (this isn’t hyperbole) and it was healthier to stop. I fully plan to go back to finish it, because good heavens, I don’t think there’s a better written or performed programme on TV. But only when I’m feeling remarkably upbeat and comfortable, and thus emotionally prepared to get through it. I’m not sure I could pay the programme a higher compliment than this.

John Safran’s Race Relations – ABC Australia

I think I have far more to say about this show than fits in here. It’s extraordinary. I just haven’t worked out if it’s a brilliant statement on race and relationships, or the most horrendous thing I’ve ever seen. Safran is a 37 year old (although looks ten years younger) white Jew living in Australia, trying to work out whether he should settle down with a nice Jewish girl like his mother always wanted, or follow his desire for Eurasian girls. Along the way he tries to understand racial divides of many sorts, by some really quite troubling first-hand experience.

He’s been making these part-documentary, part-comedy shows for years, each using his affection for pranks as a basis for making arguments on various topics. How relevant or appropriate you think the stunts are, and whether they achieve anything close to a statement on the topics for you, will likely define whether you think him a genius or scumbag. So for this series, well, how do you feel about his visiting an Israeli sperm bank to make a donation, then getting his Palestinian cameraman to provide the sample? Then repeating the same in reverse in Palestine, this time smuggling his own Jewish seed into the vaults. Or blacking up and hanging out with unwitting members of a New York militant black organisation, and then preaching in a predominantly black church. Or stealing the underwear of ex-girlfriends and Eurasian celebrities in order to perform an experiment. Or getting off with their mums. Or getting crucified, including having nails driven through his hands and feet. And it goes on. (Like digging up his mother’s grave to perform a Kabbalah prayer, for instance.)

There’s an enormous amount of squirming to get through an episode. His willingness to subject himself to hideous humiliation is extremely uncomfortable. For me, when the humiliation occurs to others (which is extremely rarely, to be fair), the discomfort becomes too much. Watching him in Thailand, dressed as a Eurasian woman (one of his exes, more disturbingly) and going on a date with a local amorous man, getting paralytically drunk and making out with him, then sleeping in the street outside – no one’s better for it. Goodness knows if any of it’s real – I hope it’s not. The blacking up in episode 2 is… it’s probably the most terrifying thing I’ve seen. But it’s hard to find too much complaint with a man who attempts to gas David Irving in a radio studio.

Kids In The Hall: Death Comes To Town – CBC

The news that the Kids In The Hall were to reunite on television was hard to know how to take. The sketch show finished in 1994, with the ultro-flop movie Brain Candy released in ‘96. Despite reunion tours and live shows over the last decade, it’s still 16 years since they were last on TV. I adored the original show back then, and I still do. The DVDs take up a lot of space on my shelves. Discovering KITH was one of those watershed moments for me, switching on Channel 4 one night aged 14/15 and seeing comedy delivered in a way I hadn’t experienced before. It was unquestionably hit and miss. Deliberately so, it seemed. Many sketches were just thoughts, whims, without any perceivable direction. And none of their sketches ever reached a conclusion. They were the sketch comedy equivalent of a song that fades out rather than comes to a prescribed ending, each scene dissolving into mumbled lines while the audience whooped to let the viewer know it was over. Also, while men playing women wasn’t anything new for sketch comedy, playing them convincingly was. Despite knowing almost no one who watched it, everyone seems to remember Mr. Tyzik crushing people’s heads from his deckchair. I’m not quite sure how this character permeated a generation’s consciousness without anyone ever actually watching it.

It was my Python. I was born three years after Flying Circus finished, and it wasn’t usefully repeated until my later teenage years. Kids In The Hall caught me at just the right moment, similarly peculiar and uninterested in following traditional sketch form. And importantly for a kid my age, showed me gay characters in an unmelodramatic way – something British TV certainly wasn’t doing.

Toward the end the sketches grew longer, less stage-based and more often shot on film. It was clear they were interested in the single-camera format. Which gives me an excuse to put in this longer sketch from season 4, that highlights most of the things described above, and also shows off Mark McKinney’s range (playing the preacher enemy, one of the Sex Girls, and the director at the start):

So what to think about their getting back together to create a new show, single camera, and without an audience. Clearly as a huge KITH fan it seemed like brilliant news. But then should you ever go back? In this case, well, possibly not.

Death Comes To Town unapologetically borrows from The League Of Gentlemen. It’s a provincial Canadian town populated by people played by the five members of the troupe, following the events following their mayor’s death shortly after learning they would not be hosting the 2016 Olympics. Death has, shockingly enough, come to town, and has a few people’s souls to collect while he’s there.

It’s certainly true to the KITH format. They play most of the characters, they’re mostly caricatures, and it’s paced extremely slowly. However, each episode feels a little empty. I think what’s revealed more than anything else is how valuable the audience was on the ’90s show, providing both someone for the troupe to perform to, and some punctuation for the viewer. While they’re not aiming for big laughs, the cameo appearance of McKinney’s Chicken Lady would have been a lot more meaningful and entertaining if there’d been the inevitable chorus of cheers as she appeared.

But more importantly they don’t go far enough in any direction. Where League of Gentlemen was grotesque, this is extremely mild. Even the incredibly slow-burning plot of the gay man in love with the mayor who’s dug up his corpse and is attempting a life of marital bliss is somehow extremely forgettable. And I’m having a good deal of trouble working out exactly what Death is doing, or why. It does show off the skills of everyone involved. McKinney is unsurprisingly the best, but Scott Thompson’s range is quite phenomenal. It’s just hard to shake the idea that they’re spreading enough plot for one episode across two or three.

Legend Of The Seeker – Various

Based on The Sword Of Truth novels by Terry Goodkind, this is the only trad fantasy left on TV (unless I’m mistaken). Following the adventures of Richard, the Seeker, a young man who is imbued with enhanced instincts and sword-fighting skills, accompanied by the wizard of the First Order Zeddicus Zu’l Zorander and Confessor Kahlan (and currently a Mord’Sith called Cara), they, um, wander about fighting stuff.

It’s fun writing all that nonsense. This is mostly played very straight, but thanks to executive production from Sam Raimi and Robert Tapert there’s just enough of a Xena/Hercules vibe to keep it light, although never ironic. (And of course this means Ted Raimi has appeared twice now. Still no sign of Bruce Campbell, but surely it can only be a matter of time? He must miss the flight to New Zealand.) The first season was about fighting Darken Rahl, an evil ruler who controlled vast armies, determined to take over the whole of the land. Season 2 has him in the Underworld, still causing trouble, but in a much more ambiguous way that leaves the crew more open to stumbling into more varied situations. They’re technically following some magic compass thing now, to stop the Satan-alike from using everyone’s dead bodies to start an army, but despite travelling for squillions of miles to follow this they’re still always a day’s walk from anywhere they’ve been before. I’d love to see someone trace the route they’ve taken this season on a map.

Other brilliant things include that Zed says, “This is a DARK and TERRIBLE magic!” every week about every magic thing he ever encounters. And Kahlan will confess (putting her hands on someone’s throat which makes their eyes turn black and then they become her devoted slave forever) someone every week, who will then be conveniently killed later so she doesn’t have to have him follow her about. Oh, and they’ve take the Pushing Daisies approach to the Will They Won’t They, by setting up a situation where if Kahlan sleeps with Richard he’ll be confessed and therefore not able to save the world any more. Except this appears to be only a challenge to the writers to find excuses for them to cop off and get away with it. Last week Kahlan was bodily split into two halves of her personality, one half unable to confess, so they ran full pelt to the nearest grassy spot.

They’re spending decent money on each episode ($1.5m, apparently, which is a hefty chunk for a show that’s made as a first-run syndication, meaning it’s not on any fixed channel – ABC pays for it, but doesn’t air it), and the fights are often very splendid. While serious, it avoids being po-faced. I like it far more than I probably should.

Leverage – TNT

Season 2 of the techo Robin Hood has been given an advantage by the show’s weak link, Gina Bellman, being away on maternity leave, replaced by the far superior Jeri Ryan. The band of thieves help to right a wrong by scamming the rich to make money for the poor, using elaborate cons that require constant improvisation as twists and turns arrive from each angle. Season 1 was a far tighter run, however. Season 2 has had some really disappointingly dull episodes, alongside some splendid ones. However, one episode in particular makes up for any other that’s lacking: their open, bold reveal of all the scams and tricks used by so-called mediums. It should be shown in schools as the most spectacular lesson on how cold reading, and hot reading, work – a step by step breakdown that explains it all with even more clarity than James Randi’s eloquent lectures. Parker was cold read by the medium, who talked about her brother who had died on his bicycle, which she had taught him to ride. Well, here it is:

It’s never been done so well. And then the rest of the episode is about getting spectacular, fair revenge on this dreadful man. And yes, that was Luke Perry.

Lie To Me – FOX

This is another show, like Castle, that has really found its feet in its second run. The first season was a fun show, but felt extremely laboured. Tim Roth is an expert at detecting when people are lying via recognising micro-gestures. And because of this he can solve all murders and prevent terrorists from blowing up the world. In the first season it was so tortuous as they created a super-sized version of the scrap of science behind it all, making it ludicrous. “Did you see that?! Stop it just there!” cries Roth, as they freezeframe the gurning criminal contorting his face into a cartoon grimace. Yes Mr Roth, we all did. Season 2 has been far more relaxed, focusing on the far more interesting aspects of the show – primarily Roth’s being a cock and always right. Unlike House, Roth’s Dr. Cal Lightman always has a good reason for being rude to people, provoking the emotional response he needs, or whatever. But it’s still fun to watch his Quasimodo lurching and grumpy right-being. Plus it had a song.

Sorry to end on that, but it had to stop somewhere.

by John Walker at March 01, 2010 01:03 AM

If some supreme being could give British leftists of my generation the power to go back and stop one historical event, I have no doubt that we would rewind the tape and wipe out the Falklands war. Before General Galtieri’s fascistic junta invaded the islands Margaret Thatcher had no “-ism” after her name. She seemed a doomed prime minister surrounded by enemies, whose party was third in the polls behind the SDP, a political force I suspect many young readers have never heard of. After Britain’s victory, nothing could stop her and by the time she had finished, British socialism was dead, and the prospects for British social democracy did not seem much healthier.

To the revolted minority who watched her brag that she had made Britain great again, the war was a bloody PR exercise that allowed her to surf a wave of jingoism. Victory in the South Atlantic bought off voters, who should have been worrying about mass unemployment and mass factory closures, with homecoming parades and tales of gallantry under fire. The Falklands were not worth dying for, we insisted. Britain and Argentina were “two bald men fighting over a comb”, snapped Gabriel García Márquez. “Falklanders who wish to remain inviolate and British citizens are on a hiding to nowhere. They are too few. They are too far away,” declared the Marxist historian EP Thompson in the Times, which in the hysterical atmosphere of 1982 provoked Tories to denounce him and the editor of the Times as virtual traitors.

As it turned out, anti-war protesters were on “a hiding to nowhere”.
Read the whole thing

by Nick Cohen at February 28, 2010 11:29 AM

Spectator Australia Diary, 24 February 2010

I think I may have died and gone to heaven. I am in Australia as the guest of the United Israel Appeal, to talk to Australian Jews about what can only be described as Britain’s derangement on the subject of Israel and, by extension, America and the war to defend the free world. In Britain, supporting Israel has become an activity to be undertaken only by consenting adults in private. Zionism is now the liberation movement that dare not speak its name. But in Australia, I meet people who not only see nothing untoward about the UIA and even openly support Israel. Many are concerned by what they see and hear of Britain. They have relatives there; they visit but don’t recognise it. I hardly saw an English person there, they say. I tell them that in Britain this kind of talk would be deemed racist, maybe even a hate crime.

The Australian Jews strike me as a robust and confident community. This is surely because they have nothing to fear from their fellow Aussies, who are on the same page. Australians don’t have Britain’s thousand-year history of — how to put it — profound cultural ambivalence towards the Jews. Australia also still has a strong sense of itself as a nation (although this is now under assault, as in Britain, from the intelligentsia). Self-confident nations tend not to turn upon their Jews. Britain’s national identity is unravelling; one symptom is the current net emigration of indigenous Brits. The Australian Jewish audiences I speak to, many of them Holocaust survivors or their children, are aghast to hear about both the virulence of British anti-Israel bigotry and the way in which the establishment is sucking up to Islamic extremists — or as our government tells us to call them, ‘anti-Islamic’ extremists. I warn them, however, to treat me with circumspection since I am known to be an extremist Zionist insane warmongering Islamophobe. They cheer.

It is very odd to hear people in Australia still talking about Tony Blair with admiration. Wasn’t it a treat to hear him at the Iraq inquiry, they say; isn’t he just so wonderfully articulate, what a shame he isn’t still Britain’s prime minister. I tell them that in Britain people think Blair should be prosecuted for war crimes and that the Iraq inquiry is widely viewed as a hanging tribunal for a mendacious and illegal war. They are baffled. When I tell them that it was public feeling against the Iraq war and his support for Israel that drove Blair from office early, they are open-mouthed.

I am reminded that when I last spoke in Australia a few years ago, I shocked one Blair admirer when I observed that the former PM’s support for the Iraq war was actually out of character as the one good thing he did in a governmental record of general nihilistic radicalism. The name of the individual whom I thus so cruelly disabused was Tony Abbott.

In Perth, I observe the enormous amount of new building that is going on. The city is booming from the exploitation of Western Australia’s vast natural mineral resources. Ah, I think, so this must be where all those British emigrés are fetching up. I am conscious of an unfamiliar sensation. It is called being in a place that has a purpose and a future.

I am mesmerised by Tony Abbott. A conservative politician who actually articulates conservative values! A political leader who actually leads! Such a phenomenon is unknown in Britain, where David Cameron’s Conservatives believe they have to go with the left-wing flow. And of all issues, Abbott actually won his party leadership through scorning man-made global warming theory for the scam that it is. This is surely as if Galileo had been elected to the Papacy. Abbott thus took on and bested not only Prime Minister Rudd but his own Liberal party colleagues who had supported Rudd’s ruinous environmental policies. And wonder of wonders, such realism is winning votes; people queue up to say to me: ‘At last, a politician who tells it as it is.’ As a result, Abbott is snapping at Rudd’s heels. A politician who is not afraid to tell unfashionable truths to ideological power; a conservative who is fighting on the right side of the culture wars. Can I bottle him and take him home with me?

I arrive in Sydney to 40-degree heat and humidity to match. People talk about the weather almost as obsessively as they do in Britain. I admire the city’s exquisite waterfront, and note how much of Sydney’s recreational life is conducted on or around water. This surely contributes to the pervasive sense — despite the city’s troubling slum areas — of general well-being and high quality of life. Kind friends take me out for a spin round the harbour in their boat. The rain teems down and we put up umbrellas in the open stern, but despite the tropical deluge the views are still magnificent.

When the weather improves, I do the glorious walk from my hotel on Bondi Beach along the cliffs. I do no more than paddle in the ocean because I fear that I may be eaten by a shark. Brits like me probably think that Australian beaches are regularly scenes of carnage straight out of Jaws just as Aussies believe that England is still ruled by chinless wonders in ermine. To my joy, I discover a wonderful sea-water pool carved out of the rocks on Bronte Beach, provided for no charge by the munificent Waverley council. I bet such a pool wouldn’t be free in Britain. But then there aren’t so many sharks in Britain. Only in politics and the media.

I am bemused to read that the populist demagogue and reputed über-xenophobe Pauline Hanson intends to come to live in Britain. Talk about frying pans and fires! Doesn’t she realise that she’s coming to a multicultural paradise where we are fortunate to enjoy the benefits of a burgeoning parallel informal jurisdiction of Sharia law, where the burqa is more visible than the Beefeaters, and where our wise government employs Islamic radicals to advise it on countering Islamic radicalism? On the other hand, perhaps she does. The truly racist British National Party, which is making opportunistic hay with the mainstream parties’ refusal to address legitimate concerns about mass immigration and Islamisation, may be looking for a leader who doesn’t look like a thug. Just when so many Brits are going the other way, too. Australia gets Ben Elton, we get Pauline Hanson. Says it all, really.

by Melanie Phillips at February 28, 2010 12:15 AM

Here is a handy guide to understanding the future of the BBC under the Conservatives. A schools pack is available.

Stuart X: It’s like that thing they had to cancel with local-news websites or video or something last year, because it was so good that commercial operations couldn’t compete.
Stuart X: WHY THE FUCK ARE WE SUPPOSED TO CARE ABOUT THAT?
Stuart X: We’re forced by law to pay for something that’s made deliberately worse.
John X: Don’t worry, not for much longer!
Stuart X: They’re going to stop charging?!??!!???!!?
John X: Entirely!
Stuart X: And it won’t turn out to be just another shitty ITV??!?!?!!?!?!
John X: No no, you misunderstand.
John X: Imagine it like this:
John X: Imagine I’m a bread shop.
John X: And I sell bread for 80p a loaf.
John X: Okay?
Stuart X: Following you so far.
John X: So if you want some bread, currently you have to pay me 80p.
John X: Well, what’s going to happen under the nice Mr Cameron is my bread shop is going to be destroyed by a nuclear bomb.
John X: So you won’t have to pay 80p for bread ever again!
Stuart X: But where will I get bread?
John X: There’s no bread.
Stuart X: I don’t understand! I LIKE BREAD!
John X: Be quiet.
Stuart X: The only other stuff I can put marmalade on is made by Ian’s Tasty Vittles down the road, and it’s made of dogshit.
John X: I said be quiet.
Stuart X: And I have to stop eating every three bites so I can throw up.
John X: Can somebody call the police?

by John Walker at February 26, 2010 04:40 PM

New Rule. It’s an emergency one.

#38 NO ONLINE ACCOUNTS FOR BABIES OR PETS OR ANYTHING ELSE THAT ISN’T YOU.

Completely outlawed are Twitter, Facebook, Bebo or whatever else accounts for anyone that isn’t you. Your baby can neither read nor write, let alone comprehend what Twitter is. Your baby is a barely sentient parasite, and there’s nothing cute or endearing about pretending that he or she is writing your observations that you somehow think – despite there being almost 7 billion people are alive – are unique to your vomiting blob.

The same goes for pets. Your cat isn’t typing, is it? What is it doing? It’s ignoring you, isn’t it? Your cat has better things to do than you, which is why it’s not writing on Twitter about how much it loves its mummy. You are. So stop it, because good grief.

by John Walker at February 26, 2010 02:35 PM

I’m reposting this piece about Psych written about a year and a half ago as it’s no longer online elsewhere. Giant Realm briefly had me writing about TV (one day, somewhere, I’ll get a regular gig writing about TV for a magazine or website that won’t immediately close down) before they pulled their entire blog. This is the unedited version, because the edited was so comprehensively translated into American that it often didn’t read like me.

And I should add in the interests of balance, this week’s episode of Psych was awful. Fortunately, last week’s was one of the best ever.

At the mention of its name, the reaction people give to Psych tends to be, “That show? Really? I saw maybe one episode – it seemed alright.” I want to put that right. I want to convince you that Psych is the most entertaining show on TV this summer. I will use a collection of silly names, and a pineapple.

The show’s conceit, to put it mildly, is contrived. Shawn Spencer (James Roday, Miss Match) is the son of a retired cop, who spent his childhood having observational skills drummed into him by his forbidding father. As an adult he’s kept his hyper-observant talents, but no job for longer than three months. That’s until his habit for solving crimes by watching the local evening news caused the police to become suspicious. Needing a way out to prevent his being arrested, he invented the story that he was a psychic, convincing the officers and detectives by throwing out a few ‘hot reads’ based on all the stuff his eagle eyes had spotted. Well, convincing all of them but one, the surly Detective Lassiter (Timothy Omundson) remaining heavily sceptical.

Realising the potential for this, and being asked by the (interim) police chief (Kirsten Nelson) to help out on a case, Shawn ropes in his childhood best friend, Burton ‘Gus’ Guster (West Wing’s Dulé Hill), and forms the private detective agency, Psych. So far, so much nonsense. But that’s the key. This is about nonsense, from top to bottom to either side. It’s a celebration of being silly, loosely draped over a fond parody of procedural crime drama. Embrace the nonsense, and you won’t be able to resist the show.

Created and overseen by Steve Franks (er, writer of Big Daddy, but ignore that), Psych’s ensemble cast (also including L.A. Law veteran Corbin Bersnen as Shawn’s dad, and Maggie Lawson as Detective Lassiter’s junior partner, Juliet O’Hara) are given a joyful freedom to improvise within the structure. And fantastically, they’re all competent and confident to do that. In fact, many of the series’ best running gags have begun as off-script moments.

So a typical episode: There’s a flashback to the 80s, as we see little Shawn and Gus up to some childhood shenanigans, which will reflect on that episode’s theme. Cut to the present day, and Shawn and Gus stumble upon a crime, often a murder, either by coincidence or being called in by the police. Shawn then scans the scene, takes in all the vital information, and cracks irreverent comments in inappropriate surroundings. Gus huffs and puffs in the background, and complains that he should be at work, or runs outside to be sick. Then Shawn drags Gus along on his entirely illegal methods of investigation (breaking into places, reading private documents, that sort of thing) and then later has a “psychic vision” for the police that legitimately leads them toward what he’d illegitimately found. Ploughing through a few suspects, and a row with his dad, eventually Shawn will pip the cops to the post, and present his Poirot-meets-Seann William Scott accusatory speech. The criminal fesses up, and Lassiter groans. Cue gags for epilogue.

But the reason this works, the reason this is the show that should be filling your empty months of television’s summer wasteland, is because this is simply the framework to support that episode’s daftness. Each episode is themed. Perhaps it’s spoofing a particular television programme, like season 2’s opener, American Duos, tearing American Idol a new one, with the most cruel and hilarious mockery of Paula Abdul’s, er, tiredness and confusion. Nevermind Tim Curry as a Simon Cowell-like, spitting venomous bile while someone is incessantly trying to murder him. Or perhaps it’s their recent tribute to The Goonies, with Steven Weber as Shawn’s treasure hunting uncle, brilliantly titled “The Greatest Adventure In The History Of Basic Cable”. (Actually, I want to throw a couple of other episode titles at you, because, well, they’re brilliant. “Meat Is Murder, But Murder Is Also Murder,” for instance. Or how about, “Woman Seeking Dead Husband: Smokers Okay, No Pets”? Their Latino soap opera episode, “Lights Camera… Homicido”? But I don’t know whether, purely for its literal simplicity, “Gus’s Dad May Have Killed An Old Guy” can be beaten).

Each episode contains an array of running jokes. Shawn introducing Gus to a stranger is always best, and one of the gags that began as an improvised moment by James Roday when he said, “Hello, I’m Shawn Spencer and this is my partner, Gus ‘Sillypants’ Jackson.” The writers picked up on it, and it’s inescapable. “My name is Byron Bojangles III, this is my partner, Shutterfly Simmons.” After breaking into hospital changing rooms, emerging in a white coat: “Hello, I’m Dr. Howser, and this is my personal candy striper, Nicknack.” Forced to work alongside his father in this season’s “Disco Didn’t Die. It Was Murdered!”, (a ludicrous tribute to 1970s cop shows, including the most remarkably dumb excuse for having them dressed up in appropriately ‘hip’ clothing), he exasperatedly interrupts Shawn’s attempt with, “Yeah, yeah, that’s his partner Methuselah Honeysuckle, which makes me Old Scratch Johnson.”

I’m not winning you over with silly names? How about a never-explained love for the pineapple, the pleasingly-shaped fruit making a cameo appearance in every episode, no matter how strained? No? Dammit. Well, try this: Psych has to be the only show on television in which the two heroes run away at the merest sight of danger. Both are complete cowards, pegging it the moment something unusual happens. The gusto they put into their fleeing is worth the show alone.

I’m not sure it can be done without just watching it. And I implore you to give it a go. The cast are so strong, and confident enough with their roles to be able to try to throw each other in the middle of a scene. Outtakes prove that rarely is the same line delivered twice in following takes. The guest stars are increasingly fantastic, the most recent featuring the permanently brilliant Jane Lynch. The themes are increasingly rich, the second episode of the current run (“Murder?… Anyone?… Anyone?… Bueller?”) built around every John Hughes movie ever, including Shawn’s performance of all the dances from that awful scene in The Breakfast Club. Oh, just watch it, please!

This is what it comes down to: Good television writing is to be treasured. That it happens to be a show with the most ridiculous conceit of all, and one that frankly doesn’t make much sense by season 3 where he might just as well tell the police he isn’t a psychic, what with a proven record of over 30 arrests based on his observational skills, isn’t a reason to roll your eyes at it. It’s a reason to realise the writers totally get that, and love it. They mock conventions of television constantly, Shawn once thanking Gus for “nutshelling” the story so far. It’s self-aware, bubbling over with enthusiasm, beautifully scripted, and with a stunning cast. It just happens to be ludicrous. And that’s great. And that’s why you should love it. Final proof. Watch this utterly irrelevant trailer.

(Not embedded because the USA network is so ASTONISHINGLY stupid that they’ve prevented embedding on A TRAILER FOR THEIR PROGRAMME.)

by John Walker at February 26, 2010 10:43 AM

“Blair is like Margaret Thatcher now — a politician for whom the broadcasters can never have a good word. In Mo, Channel 4’s otherwise excellent drama-documentary on the last years of Mo Mowlam, Blair appeared as a despicable and vain figure who plotted to take the credit for Mowlam’s hard work. Channel 4 could not say the British Prime Minister had to get involved in the peace process because the Irish Taoiseach and the American President were already involved. It ignored the realities of international diplomacy and dismissed Blair’s achievements because, I suspect, the climate in broadcasting is such that to declare that he was not all bad is like announcing that you have seen the sweet side of a serial killer or possess sympathy for the Devil.

One day, probably about 30 years from now, a cultural historian will go through the political television of our time and wonder why, if Blair was such a palpably evil man, he managed to win so many elections.”
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by Nick Cohen at February 25, 2010 07:11 PM

In an unprecedented eighteenth episode of Rum Doings we don’t discuss what we will do on Earth about potholes. However, we do quite brilliantly demonstrate how to drink. And then immediately return to our favourite topic of recent times: ketchup. Via some quite astonishing observation comedy, of course. But we promise the ketchup talk is confined to only the beginning.

Then there’s happy stories of service experiences, which leads us to what will be remembered by history as the greatest series of “time” themed puns mankind has ever heard. And welcome to the new job title: the shorekeeper. Then there’s Nick’s racist t-shirt and his mule child.

Then it’s time for part two of The Rules, which those who didn’t want us to do any more will be pleased to learn completes the collection. Where we learn that all our listeners should all embrace death, because they can’t be bothered to promote us or write to us.

There’s a few things we ask for in return for this present. Could you retweet about it, or find a way to tell new people to listen? And writing a review on iTunes helps us a great deal. We’d appreciate it.

To get this episode directly, right click and save here. To subscribe to Rum Doings click here, or you can find it in iTunes here.

by John Walker at February 24, 2010 01:12 PM

The personal relates to the political very closely in Gordon Brown’s case because his bullying is not a manifestation of his dynamism and determination but of his childish inability to admit error and acknowledge the need for change. Nowhere are the weaknesses of his character more obvious than in his aides treatment of Alistair Darling during at the start of the economic crisis. Darling had told my Guardian colleague Decca Aitkenhead that we were facing the worst recession in 60 years. If Darling was guilty of anything, it was understatement. But Brown could not tolerate his clear-headed assessment, because it revealed that his supposed economic miracle was an illusion and implied that his failures to regulate the banks and balance the budget would have catastrophic consequences. So out went his attack dogs to undermine the chancellor at the very moment when he needed the Prime Minister’s support.

I heard Charlie Whelan, Brown’s prolier-than-thou public school boy, denounce the Chancellor outside a Soho pub. It says much for Whelan’s certainty that the political press would obey orders that he did not go off the record but conducted his black propaganda operation in a public place where anyone might have overheard him.
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by Nick Cohen at February 24, 2010 10:07 AM

Daily Mail, 24 February 2010

Of all the issues of concern to the public, immigration is possibly the most explosive — and the one about which the most lies are continuing to be told.

During the period that Labour has been in office, mass immigration has simply changed the face of Britain. The total number of immigrants since 1997 is pushing three million.

Ministers claim that immigration policy has been driven principally to help the economy. They have always denied that they actually set out deliberately to change the ethnic composition of the country.

Well, now we know for a certainty that this is not true. The Government embarked on a policy of mass immigration to change Britain into a multicultural society — and they kept this momentous aim secret from the people whose votes they sought.

Worse still, they did this knowing that it ran directly counter to the wishes of those voters, whose concerns about immigration they dismissed as racist; and they further concealed official warnings that large-scale immigration would bring about significant increases in crime.

The truth about this scandal was first blurted out last October by Andrew Neather, a former Labour Party speechwriter.

He wrote that until the new points-based system limiting foreign workers was introduced in 2008 — in response to increasing public uproar — government policy for the previous eight years had been aimed at promoting mass immigration.

The ‘driving political purpose’ of this policy, wrote Neather, was ‘to make the UK truly multicultural’ — and one subsidiary motivation was ‘to rub the Right’s nose in diversity and render their arguments out of date’.

Misters, however, went to great lengths to keep their real intentions secret from the public — with, said Neather, a ‘paranoia’ that these would reach the media — since they knew their core white working-class voters would react very badly.

Accordingly, a report about immigration by a government advisory unit, which formed the core of a landmark speech in 2000 announcing the loosening of border controls, went through several drafts before it was finally published — and the Government’s true intentions about changing Britain into a multicultural society were removed from the final version.

After revealing all this, Neather subsequently tried to backtrack, saying that his views had been twisted out of all recognition by the media. They hadn’t been.

Nevertheless, Jack Straw, who was Home Secretary at the time the immigration policy was changed, said he had read press reports of Neather’s remarks with incredulity since they were ‘the reverse of the truth’.

Now we know, however, that they were indeed the truth. We know this only because details of the advisory unit’s report which were excised from the final published version — just as Neather said — have been emerging into the public domain through Freedom of Information requests.

The pressure group MigrationWatch obtained an early draft which revealed that the Government’s intention was to encourage mass immigration for ’social objectives’ — in other words, to produce a more ethnically diverse society — but that on no fewer than six occasions this phrase was excised from the final version, published some three months later.

Now we further discover, from what was removed from seemingly another early draft, that the aim was not just to implement this policy of mass immigration without the knowledge or consent of the British people.

It was done in the full knowledge that the people actually wanted immigration reduced.

And we also discover that those who expressed such concerns were dismissed with utter contempt as racists — and it was further suggested that ministers should manipulate public opinion in an attempt to change people’s attitudes.

Well, they have certainly tried to do that by hanging the disgusting label of ‘racism’ round the neck of anyone who dares voice such concerns.

Thus the eminent and decent Labour MP Frank Field found himself smeared as a racist for daring to suggest that the rate of immigration should be reduced.

What bullying arrogance. The real prejudice is surely to believe that opposition to mass migration can never be based on any reasonable objection.

The implications of this covert policy are quite staggering. Ministers deliberately set out to change the cultural and ethnic identity of this country in secret.

They did this mainly because they hated what Britain was, a largely homogeneous society rooted in 1,000 years of history. They therefore set out to replace it by a totally new kind of multicultural society — and one in which the vast majority of newcomers could be expected to vote Labour.

They set out to destroy the right of the British people to live in a society defined by a common history, religion, law, language and traditions. They set out to destroy for ever what it means to be culturally British and to put another ‘multicultural’ identity in its place.

And they then had the gall to declare that to have love for or pride in that authentic British identity, and to want to protect and uphold it, was racist.

So the very deepest feelings of people for their country were damned as bigotry, for which crime they were to have their noses rubbed in mass immigration until they changed their attitudes.

What an appalling abuse of power. Yet even now they are denying that this is what they did. Yesterday, the Immigration Minister Phil Woolas blustered that the advisory unit report had not been accepted by ministers at the time.

But the fact is that mass immigration actually happened. The only thing ministers hadn’t accepted was that the truth about their intentions should be revealed to the public.

Surreally, Mr Woolas further claims that the Government has brought immigration down.

But the reductions he is talking about have taken place on the separate issue of asylum. The impact of the Government’s new points scheme upon the record rate of immigration growth has been negligible.

The truth is that these early drafts of the advisory unit’s report have blown open one of the greatest political scandals of the Labour years. At no stage did Labour’s election manifestos make any reference to a policy of mass immigration nor the party’s aim of creating a multicultural society.

What we have been subjected to is a deliberate deception of the voters and a gross abuse of democracy.

There could scarcely be a more profound abuse of the democratic process than to set out to destroy a nation’s demographic and cultural identity through a conscious deception of the people of that nation. It is an act of collective national treachery.

Now we face imminently another General Election. And now we know that in their hearts, Labour politicians hold the great mass of the public, many of them their own voters, in total contempt as racist bigots — all for wanting to live in a country whose identity they share.

There could hardly be a more worthy issue for the Conservative Party to leap upon. Yet their response is muted through their own visceral terror of appearing racist.

The resulting despair over the refusal of the mainstream parties to address this issue threatens to drive many into the arms of the truly racist British National Party.

If that happens, the fault will lie not just with Labour’s ideological malice and mendacity, but with the spinelessness of an entire political class.

by Melanie Phillips at February 24, 2010 07:53 AM

Huge responsibility and unprecedented scrutiny have put the role of British prime minister beyond any mere mortal Published in the Guardian...

February 23, 2010 09:09 AM

I missed out so many the last time I did this, and with The Amazing Race having started, I feel like I should start from A again. But really this is F-H, with a few extras beforehand. I’ve decided to implement a code. If there’s spoilers in the piece I’ll have * at the start of stuff you shouldn’t read. Assume that it will spoil anything that’s happened in that show up to the current (US) episode. There are also some bad swears in there, delicate-eared readers. Oh, and let me know if I’ve missed anything. I know there’s still stuff from A-E that I’ve forgotten a second time.

The Amazing Race – CBS

Well, what’s to say. Eleven teams of two in a race around the world. It’s such a huge idea, and it’s still working sixteen seasons in. Perhaps what I like best about the global scale racing nonsense is that the best teams tend to win. Stupid people go out first, unpleasant people then follow, and generally it’s the nice lot left to win at the end. And if you don’t love Phil, there’s something wrong with your DNA.

Burn Notice – USA

Season one of this programme was confused. After a horrible pilot it quickly ditched a few ideas, found a groove, but didn’t really know whether to take itself seriously. By season three it really knows what it wants to be. Light-hearted, while dealing with life or death situations. The gimmick – that burned spy Michael Weston narrates giving advice to the audience for how to be a spy in various situations – still works. And it seems to trust Bruce Campbell to be Bruce Campbell a lot more. The most recent episode featured Campbell doing the most fantastic spoof of CSI, openly playing for laughs, as is more frequently the case. The theme now is for Weston to have a long-running nemesis whom he must work for/against in the hope it will get him closer to learning who burned him, while taking on weekly cases for the seemingly infinite number of friends of friends in trouble. This means we get to see him trying juggle both situations, and inevitably his chain smoking mother, while teaching us how to bug a car or break into a guarded office. It’s so silly, and thankfully it now knows it.

Caprica – Syfy

I’m still not sure what I think of this four episodes in. Boy, they weren’t kidding when they said Dynasty with robots, were they? It doesn’t make a lot of sense bearing in mind the channel it’s on. Were this on ABC, I could see the sense in trying to establish soap opera plots between warring families and so on. But it’s on the Sci Fi channel (no matter how idiotically they choose to spell that), and I’m not convinced that your average drama viewer really wants there to be an eight foot robot with the soul of a teenage girl trapped inside it. In fact, I feel like I’ve just talked myself out of watching it.

Dexter – Showtime

How could I have forgotten Dexter? Well, mostly because its run had finished by the time I wrote the last post. After a disappointing third season, season 4 really brought it home. Season 3 couldn’t figure out what to do with Dexter, and ended up meandering wildly while really only repeating patterns. The arrival of John Lithgow changed everything. Dexter had someone to look up to. A serial killer who’d been working for decades, and one who managed to maintain a family – Dexter’s dream. With Rita having had their baby, and her previous two kids now thinking of Dexter as their father, he struggles to calculate how to maintain this and allow his dark passenger time to hunt and kill.

* And then of course he learns the truth. The moment Lithgow erupts at his wife, roaring at her that she’s a “CUNT!”, is astonishing. It’s like a rock being thrown at a stained glass window, shattering and falling to the ground, the bare reality of the horror revealed. Dexter’s moment of realisation, that this man is no one to look up to but in fact his next worthy victim, is extraordinary. And then it becomes a fantastic cat-and-mouse chase, Dexter racing not only to kill his new enemy, but also to beat his sister before she solves the crimes. It still has some absolutely terrible dialogue – for such an original show the writers really do love to lapse into the most ghastly cliché. And the final twist, which I can’t bring myself to spoil (or believe really happened, for that matter – can’t it just be a dream?) means season 5 is going to be… it’s going to be traumatic.

Family Guy – FOX

I think I said most of what I have to say about this the other day. But I also think people are talking nonsense with the constant cries of Not As Good As It Used To Be! I remember people saying this after season 1, then it was season 3 when its quality fell, and now it’s maintained that it was great up until season 5. It’s still great. Sometimes. Sometimes it’s pretty average. As has always been the case.

Glee – FOX / E4

Wow, I was watching this, then got a few episodes behind, and suddenly it’s an international phenomenon with multiple songs in the charts and everyone’s discussing it everywhere non-stop. Which is odd, since I was convinced it wouldn’t find an audience. My reasoning being, it was too dark, too clever, and too mean-spirited. The pilot was on TV before the Summer, which was another strange moment. And then POW! Biggest thing ever. So it shows how much I know. Although since I gave up around episode four or five, I think it was declining pretty fast. What I liked about it was that it seemed to be mocking the High School Musical movement. It seems to have become the High School Musical movement. If it’s managed to do this while remaining as cruel and cynical, then I’m delighted. But I’m not sure I’ve the energy to find out.

House – FOX/C5

* I’ve heard people argue House is nicer this season. I dispute this. After the end of season 5, with his complete nervous breakdown, the writers had multiple directions to head in. I rather dreaded they’d pick the easiest – reset status quo. House gets out of the psychiatric ward, gets hold of pills, everything’s back the way it was and we carry on. It would have been fine, since the way it was was bloody excellent. But it would be a lame decision. Another terrible idea would have been a redemption pathway for House. They didn’t do that either. Instead they picked the best route of all.

House clean from opoids is still a dick. He’s also a far more interesting dick. He’s gained dimensions. He very occasionally feels guilt. He understands that doing something will upset someone else unfairly. He does it anyway. So people are suggesting this means he’s now a nicer person. No he’s not! Now he’s doing the unbelievably cruel things to his friends and colleagues while able to empathise with the pain it’s causing.

More than ever the patients are purely background detail for the real focus of an episode. The only equivalent I can think of is Homicide: Life On The Streets, where the murders were not the episode’s arcing theme, but rather the excuse to see the cast interacting. And thank goodness. I don’t know whether it’s an in-joke on the show to have House discover the real cure for a patient at 38 minutes into an episode, but I don’t think there’s been an episode in two seasons where it hasn’t happened in that minute. Even in the most recent episode – the Cuddy special that didn’t feature an on-screen patient of any sort – still managed to have the resolving discovery happen minute 38. Because this is a programme about how House treats his staff and friends, and it’s utterly excellent. If it became about anything else it would fall to pieces, and the team behind it seem very wise to this.

How I Met Your Mother – CBS

This hasn’t been a good season for HIMYM. It’s fantastic that it’s reached a fifth year, despite never receiving the confidence boost from the network of being recommissioned before the end of its current run. But this season has lacked for the rich ideas that made it stand out previously. In fact, it’s only been able to refer back to previous running gags (goat, slap bet, etc) rather than start any of its own. It’s still charming, often funny, but the spark is missing.

It came back in force for the glorious 100th episode, which not only had Tim Gunn appear as Barney’s personal tailor, but also the spectacular Suit Song, along with its gigantic choreography. It was a wonderful episode, and one that seems to have pointed things back in the right direction since. Which is very promising. But I think time is running out for revealing the titular Mother. We’ve been to her apartment, met her housemate, seen her umbrella, and we know she was in the lecture hall Ted wasn’t supposed to be in. But guys, you’re incredibly lucky to get five seasons, and you simply aren’t going to get ten. Reveal the mother now.

Human Target – FOX

I’ve only seen the first three so far, but this is gloriously silly fun. Appearing to compete with 24 for overblown situations, it’s about a private-for-hire bodyguard who protects people in the most dangerous situations. A 300mph train, an on-fire 747, and, er, a party. The star, Mark Valley, looks as though he were carved by the same sculptor as Steve McQueen, and does a fine job of looking confident and sturdy.

Thankfully it’s very aware of its silly high concept, boosted by Chi McBride (Pushing Daisies) and Jackie Earle Haley (Rorschach in the Watchmen movie) both in comic roles. If they can keep the budget to maintain the scale, this will hopefully remain a fun action-movie-as-television series.

by John Walker at February 23, 2010 12:41 AM

Daily Mail, 22 February 2010

Air travel now appears to have turned into a sadomasochistic experience.

No, I’m not talking about the quality of the airline meals, nor the body searches before boarding the plane. I’m referring to that other facility for which the hapless passenger is a captive market — the inflight entertainment.

A couple of days ago, I returned from a trip to Australia. Since this is a seriously long haul of some 24 hours in the air, I took the opportunity to catch up with some films that I had either missed or wouldn’t normally feel like going to a cinema to see.

The result is that, in addition to the jet lag, I’m now having nightmares. For in selecting a couple of movies in particular, I found myself subjected to images of such sickening violence that they have burned into my mind and taken up residence there.

True, they had a ‘V’ for violence warning in the airline entertainment guide. But this also suggested that these were high-quality, well-reviewed films. There was no indication of quite how disturbing were the images I was about to see.

The first was the Quentin Tarantino movie Inglourious Basterds. This scooped the Supporting Actor award at last night’s Baftas, where it had been up for no fewer than six nominations.

I should have remembered that Tarantino’s signature is extreme and graphic violence, even though it is purportedly tongue-in-cheek — and an in-joke on other movies — and is therefore considered the last word in fashionable postmodern irony.

Such amused detachment is supposed to make the violence acceptable. But it is not.

The plot is all about a fictitious group of Jewish-American soldiers assembled during World War II to take revenge upon the Nazis by systematically murdering them.

The head of this commando group, played by Brad Pitt, orders his men to take thousands of Nazi scalps — an order which is taken literally, and so we are shown a scalp being sliced off to make quite sure we get the point. Hilarious!

It’s downhill all the way from there. What’s more disturbing by far than the actual images of blood and gore, however, is the psychopathic sadism and indifference to suffering displayed by the Brad Pitt character and his band of killers, who beat heads to pulp and twist fingers in open wounds.

All of this is played for laughs. But what exactly are we supposed to be laughing at? Sadism? Suffering? Genocide?

Tarantino has said his film takes aim at the ‘racism and barbarism on all sides’ in the war: the Nazis and the Jews, the Americans and the French.

But how can there possibly be any equivalence of ‘racism and barbarism’ between the Nazis and their victims? What kind of sick morality is this supposed to be?

Yet for such a stomach-turning farrago, Tarantino receives mass adulation. Apart from the Baftas, Inglourious Basterds has received eight Academy Award nominations and the Best Actor award at the Cannes Film Festival.

Oh, and it has also taken more than $320million at the box office. Well, this may be Tarantino’s biggest-grossing film to date — but to me it is just gross.

The second shock to my system at 38,000ft up was the American thriller Law Abiding Citizen.

This is also a revenge drama, in which the wife and daughter of the law-abiding citizen of the title are murdered in a break-in at their house. In the attackers’ subsequent trial, a deal is done in which the actual murderer is released after his evidence sends his accomplice to execution.

The bereaved victim is so incensed by this apparent travesty of justice that he not only murders the released attacker but, after he himself is jailed, goes on to murder just about everyone else involved in the case.

The plot thus descends into total absurdity. But what makes it so repellent is the extreme sadism of the murders that the vengeful ‘victim’ carries out, slowly dismembering his family’s attacker in order to inflict upon him as much agony as possible — and in which the perpetrator of this torture, the supposed victim of injustice, takes a psychopathic pleasure.

If there’s supposed to be some message in these movies about revenge or justice, it certainly evaded me. These are simply exceptionally nasty, cynical pieces of celluloid trash.

The slickness in their making barely disguises the fact that these films are seriously sick. What is so disturbing is the sadism — the fact that the characters take such pleasure in causing other human beings extreme agony.

For years, violence in films has been becoming more and more extreme, even in categories lower than the ‘18′ classification.

As people come to tolerate the ever-more intolerable, the violence has to be ratcheted up another few notches in order to shock audiences and censors whose moral sense is being progressively dulled.

In one of the latest examples, the British director Michael Winterbottom has defended scenes in his film The Killer Inside Me that portray extreme violence against women.

This, apparently, depicts brutal scenes of rough sex and murder; the violence, carried out to a soundtrack of classical music, is depicted in close-up shots that leave little to the imagination.

So awful is all this that, when the movie was screened last weekend at the Berlin Film Festival, there were walk-outs and booing.

Winterbottom claimed he had deliberately set out to shock. ‘If you make a film where the violence is entertaining, I think that’s very questionable,’ he said.

What humbug. What else is a film like this supposed to be if not entertainment?

That’s why it is so sick. Winterbottom says it wouldn’t lead to actual violence against women because such acts are depicted as ugly and the central character, a policeman with a secret liking of sadomasochistic sex, is an unattractive figure.

But this isn’t how such films work on people’s psyche. Their main danger is that they have in general a desensitising or brutalising effect — and may indeed inspire a few disturbed individuals to commit acts of violence themselves.

They break the taboos against extreme behaviour simply by portraying that behaviour — and thus help destroy the constraints that preserve elementary norms of decency.

It is not enough to make the sadistic character unattractive. By turning sadism into entertainment, such films inescapably turn audiences into voyeuristic accomplices.

While movies are shaped by a society’s values, they also help in turn to shape those values. And our society has become increasingly cruel, voyeuristic and sadistic. Just think Big Brother or The Weakest Link. Just think of the recent horrific crimes of torture both of and by small children.

It is striking that, with torture now elevated to the ultimate crime of crimes so that scarcely a day passes without some fresh attempt to arraign British or American forces for colluding in the mistreatment of terrorism suspects, some of the most fashionable movies have been labelled ‘torture porn’.

If torture is held to degrade and brutalise those who carry it out, then torture and sadism in even Bafta or Oscar-garlanded films degrade and brutalise those who watch them.

And to cap it all, we have to put up with the fawning over directors such as Tarantino or Winterbottom, who justify their warped fantasies by claims which are as pretentious as they are inane and amoral.

Next time I fly, I’ll stick to a book.

by Melanie Phillips at February 22, 2010 11:48 PM

If anybody in Labour's upper reaches says they don't care about the revelations serialised in the Observer, they're fibbing Published on page 5 of the Guardian...

February 22, 2010 09:01 AM

From the Observer
We swap democracy for dictatorship when we go from home to work. Air grievances about politicians as a citizen and you risk nothing. Speak out against managers as an employee and you risk your livelihood. In normal times, biting your tongue is not too shameful a tactic. Not all managers are monsters and, in any case, if workers broadcast their failings, the most obvious beneficiaries are their company’s business rivals, which may profit and grow, and drive the workers’ firm under. The ignored lesson of the Great Crash of 2008, however, is that when normal times end, the dictatorship of the manageriat can ruin companies and the rest of society.
Read the whole thing

by Nick Cohen at February 21, 2010 11:18 AM

Family Guy enjoys being offensive. It does it with glee. As creator Seth McFarlane likes to say, they’re an “equal opportunity offender”. I’m struggling to think of a subject they haven’t made wildly inappropriate jokes about. Racial stereotypes, paedophilia, infanticide, rape, degenerative disorders, disabilities, the Holocaust… A large part of the point of watching the programme is gasping in shock with your hands clasped to your mouth, unsure if you’re stifling a cry of horror or a laugh.

There have been other programmes that have taken this “no taboos” rule to more effective and more shocking places, such as the astonishing Wonder Showzen, and Drawn Together. But these were on cable. Family Guy is on at primetime on Sunday nights on Fox. Having been cancelled twice by the network, it’s proven itself fairly invincible, and with McFarlane’s new contract breaking all records they know they’re not going anywhere. And to embrace this the most recent episodes having been pushing things further and further, including as many digs at Fox as they can cram in. Last Sunday’s was particularly shocking. At least, I thought so at first.

The story focuses around Chris, the dimwitted teenage son, asking a girl with Down’s syndrome out on a date. Immediately you can make some pretty strong arguments pointing out how non-offensive this is, as Chris has absolutely no problem or concern about her disability. He’s attracted to her, and wants to go on a date with her. It’s only Stewie (the baby) who thinks there’s anything strange about it. But there’s no point in persisting with that, because it absolutely is offensive. It’s all out, hell-for-leather offensive. In fact, see if you can spot any joke they didn’t manage to get into the following truly gob-smackingly offensive song:

However, what happens next is of interest.

Chris goes on the date, and the girl is a jerk. She’s rude, selfish, unfair and manipulative. He has a horrible time, because she’s a douchebag. And I’d argue that this might just be the most inoffensive portrayal of a disabled person in television history.

Writers fall over themselves to ensure that anyone with a disability is heroic. Just being alive makes them brave! Those poor dears. Even the mighty Steven Moffat fell apart completely when putting a paraplegic character into Press Gang. It’s the precise opposite of equal opportunities. It’s patronising, and it’s embarrassing. Family Guy did an awful lot better.

There’s a larger question about the “equal opportunity offender” position to be asked. For instance, Family Guy does jokes based on gross racial stereotypes. It doesn’t do this because it believes that Asians can’t drive, or black people can’t swim, or whatever racist meme they’re picking up on. It does this because making jokes based on such notions are so ludicrously offensive. The presumed intention is not racism. It’s shock. The question is, how is an outside observer supposed to distinguish between a joke about all black people being criminals, and a joke about saying that all black people are criminals because you shouldn’t? And if that distinction isn’t apparent, is there a distinction at all? In a few decades will we look back on the days of Family Guy, Drawn Together, The Sarah Silverman Program, and so on, and see it as any different from the unironic racism on display in 1970s sitcoms?

The argument is that they’re offensive to everyone, not picking on any one group or minority. And that’s true. No one goes un-mocked, whether deaf, old, Latino, white, gay, disabled or murdered in gas chambers. To treat one group (by whichever choice of grouping you might pick) as special is offensive. To say, “It would be fine if McFarlane only picked on white middle class Americans” would be the highest hypocrisy.

But at the same time I’m tempted to believe McFarlane is a sociopath. The jokes will upset people. And not always people who deserve to be upset. (Plus I gave up watching another of his shows, American Dad, because the volume of homophobic jokes led me to wonder if he really did have a problem with gay people. And because it’s not very funny.) No rape victim deserves to be mocked. But Family Guy mocks rape victims. It mocks rapists too. And it mocks people who are offended by jokes about rape.

This particular episode has come to more attention because Sarah Palin has spoken out about it. And not out of the blue. She has a son with Down’s syndrome, and the episode makes a direct reference to her. The teenage girl with Down’s explains that her mother is the former governor of Alaska. It’s a reference that really doesn’t make much sense – Palin has a baby son, this was a teenage girl. But it was a deliberate provocation of the lunatic far-right politician. I’m not sure what the purpose of the reference was, but it was presumably simply just to be another shocking thing to say. One that, I’d argue, didn’t work particularly well. There’s a million reasons to mock Palin, but her having a disabled son doesn’t seem like it’s one of them. But when you have no rules, no boundaries, no taboos, such reasoning doesn’t apply.

Which leaves me confused about what I think. I find Family Guy very funny. I’d be a hypocrite to say otherwise. And a big part of that is being astonished by the things it says and shows. But then I also would never wish to apply its principles to my life. I believe in satirising and mocking those who are deserving. But then to make such a statement I’ve apparently appointed myself arbiter of who deserves to be mocked – a ridiculous position to put myself in. Family Guy doesn’t act in such a moralising and hypocritical way as I. So no, I’ve no fixed position on this at all.

But for one. I believe it’s okay to be offended. As a white, middle class, 30-something male perhaps I’m in too luxurious a position to make such a statement. But am I now once more applying the same patronising attitude? It’s okay for me to be offended because I’m white and middle class enough to be able to handle it! I’m turning into Chris Morris’s character on Brass Eye: “But what about people less middle class, less educated than me? Builders or blacks for instance?” So let’s go back to the beginning: I believe it’s okay to be offended. I get my fair share of mocking, often cruel, for being a Christian. I see jokes about Jesus or my faith that offend me. My response isn’t to call for the perpetrator to be silenced. It’s to be offended for a moment. It’s not a nice feeling. I live through it.

There’s a difference between being offended and being persecuted. And when we, as a society, treated offence as persecution, we belittle persecution.

by John Walker at February 17, 2010 11:03 PM

Wall Street Journal (Europe), 16 February 2010

On both sides of the Atlantic, a liberal political incumbent is in trouble. Yet the conservative opposition in both places is failing to present a clear alternative.

In Britain, the Conservative Party led by David Cameron seemed until fairly recently to be on a roll. Republicans across the pond gazed enviously as Mr. Cameron successfully ‘rebranded’ the Tories. No longer were they the ‘nasty party’ representing the rich and reactionary. Now they championed progressive causes such as environmentalism, the National Health Service and rebuilding ‘broken Britain’ through compassionate conservatism.

It was a tactic designed above all to neutralize the attacks by the liberal media, and for a while it worked. The all-powerful BBC in particular was charmed, and even the Guardian allowed itself to be interested.

Yet the British public is less impressed. Mr. Cameron has failed to ’seal the deal.’ His poll lead is crumbling and falls short of what is needed to secure an overall majority in the House of Commons after this spring’s general election. This is all the more remarkable since Gordon Brown is in deep trouble, with voters determined to punish the Labour government for its serial incompetence and mendacity. But despite this open goal, a hung parliament, with no one party gaining an overall majority, looks like a distinct possibility. A series of fumbles has left Mr. Cameron appear as an unconvincing alternative to the man he wants to replace.

First he seemed to retreat on his commitment to restore tax breaks for married couples, before hastily recommitting himself. Then, having earned plaudits for the political courage to propose deep spending cuts to tackle Britain’s public debt mountain, he quickly changed course, promising only timid initial savings. Mr. Cameron has now declared the Tories must ‘get a grip,’ implying that back-room arguments over strategy are the cause of such confusion. But the wobbles surely signal a far deeper problem: a failure to grasp what conservatism is.

Examples of this profound incoherence include the Tories’ proposal to cut spending on defence but not on international aid or the bloated and failing NHS. At the same time, they declare that they will allow householders to kill burglars with impunity even if they are running away and no longer pose any threat. Thus they manage to sign up to left-wing shibboleths while simultaneously pandering to right-wing populism. The result is that nobody knows what they really stand for except egregious opportunism.

Meanwhile the centerpiece of their new progressive image, ‘man-made global warming,’ has gone belly-up. Recent scandals exposing corruption and flakiness at the heart of the IPCC research base have finally destroyed the ‘consensus’ that warmist science was sound. Having seized upon environmentalism as a painless way of appearing progressive, the Cameroons now find that they have signed up to a charlatans’ charter. The British public, always skeptical about the imminent global apocalypse, takes a dim view of such frivolous misjudgment — especially when core conservative issues are being junked.

People are dismayed, for example, that despite the institutionalized bullying of Christians or men by politically correct anti-discrimination laws that force adoption agencies to place children with gay couples or that require local constituencies to select women as parliamentary candidates, the Tories nevertheless support gay adoption and all-women political short-lists. Core conservatives also note that the Tories are nervous about discussing mass immigration, and all but silent about Islamism and the Orwellian moral inversion that tries to criminalize legitimate concerns about radical Islam as ‘Islamophobia.’

In Britain, these spurned core conservatives are likely to vote for fringe parties or for ‘none of the above.’ Similar frustration in the U.S. by folks who feel abandoned by the entire political class is being channeled into the Tea Party movement, which is unsettling not just the Democrats but the Republican establishment as well. The problem with today’s conservatives is that they appear to assume a divine right to rule, without understanding what it is they are so divinely placed upon this earth to do.

Conservatism is not an ideology; it is rather a habit of mind that consists in defending against attack what is most to be valued. During the Cold War, conservatives knew they needed to defend liberty against totalitarian socialism. But with the defeat of the Soviet Union, they failed to recognize the continuing threat from the culture wars and the utopian desire to remake the world, of which environmentalism, multiculturalism and egalitarianism are examples.

What the Cameroons in Britain and similarly minded Republicans in America fail to acknowledge is that there are conservative majorities in both countries. Tony Blair, Bill Clinton and Barack Obama all came to power not because of their varying degrees of leftism — which were carefully disguised through ‘triangulation’ — but because people thought, however mistakenly, that they were more trusted than their opponents to defend essential values.

Indeed, the fate of John McCain proves what happens when a so-called conservative takes liberal positions on issues such as big government, environmentalism and immigration. In response, ‘go with the flow’ conservatives say society is changing and that the core conservative vote is simply disappearing. True, divorce and illegitimacy are at epidemic levels and gay and cohabiting unions are now part of the landscape. But in Britain, at least, increased tolerance of irregular life styles owes much to a sense of bowing to the inevitable rather than changing mores. The damage done, however, by the general breakdown of traditional family values and the rise of ‘lifestyle choices’ is inestimable, and people know it.

If conservatives will no longer defend truth against lies, freedom against coercion and the Judeo-Christian moral tradition against its enemies, then what is the point of conservatism at all? If what is required is the utopian agenda of a less than wholly benign nanny state, then why not vote for Labour or the Democrats, who do it so much better?

In both countries, profound changes have been forced upon the people without their consent. In Britain it was mass immigration; in America, it was the courts’ enforcement of a woman’s ‘right’ to abortion. Even though abortion may now finally be losing its incendiary edge, riding roughshod over popular consent has created a sense of profound betrayal and political alienation.

People are looking for clarity in defence of core values. Hence the appeal in the U.S. of Sarah Palin, who is shrewdly positioning herself at the head of the burgeoning Tea Party movement. In the U.K. — the home of afternoon tea — there is not yet any equivalent. The Tories have a plausible leader but no conservative agenda. In the US, Republicans have a conservative agenda provided by a grassrooots that has found its voice, but as yet no national leader to represent it.

The frightening political alienation in Britain and America will only be addressed if conservatives find a leader who reconnects with the people and the reality they represent. Read the tea-leaves: it takes two to party.

by Melanie Phillips at February 17, 2010 01:10 PM

Daily Mail, 15 February 2010

What exceedingly strange times we are living in. Normally, governments propose a policy, the Opposition opposes it and then there is a row.

But what has happened in the past few days is that, on the urgent issue of paying for long-term care for the elderly, the row exploded before we knew anything about the policy. Indeed, it seems the Government has even now not finished formulating its proposals.

Stranger still, Health Secretary Andy Burnham and his Opposition counterparts were trying to do something so controversial that they had secretly suspended hostilities and been working on the plans together — only to fall out in the most spectacular style.

The first we heard of any of this was a report that Burnham wanted to introduce a £20,000 compulsory levy, deducted from the estates of people after they had died, to fund long-term care — but that colleagues were worried about proposing something so controversial near a general election.

Within 48 hours, the Tories unleashed a hard-hitting poster branding this a £20,000 ‘death tax’ — to which the Prime Minister hit back with the revelation that the Tory health spokesman Andrew Lansley had been involved in secret talks with Burnham and their Lib Dem counterpart, Norman Lamb, to try to reach a consensus on this very issue.

There followed a stand-up row in the Commons, in which Burnham screamed at Lansley that he had committed an appalling betrayal of trust by using a proposal they had been privately discussing — and which was not yet Labour policy — as a weapon with which to attack the Government.

Extraordinarily it was then claimed that Lansley had failed to tell his boss, David Cameron, what he was up to. Quite what Lansley was playing at is still a mystery — as is what Cameron knew about these secret talks, and when.

Nevertheless, it looks as if the Tories couldn’t resist playing dirty, turning an idea that Burnham was merely discussing in good faith into ammunition to fire at Labour.

For the £20,000 ‘death tax’ idea (first floated in a green paper last year) seems to have been one of several options under discussion. To claim in lurid terms that this was Labour’s official policy seems a low blow indeed.

Although Burnham reacted like a scalded cat, it has emerged that the Government has employed pollsters to test the idea of a 10 per cent tax on post-death estates to fund elderly care. So it looks as if the Government had been leaning towards this idea.

Now, Burnham has said he will resume the consensus talks, but that the Tories can participate only if they withdraw their devastating poster. Since they will obviously do no such thing, it would appear that now it is Burnham’s turn to play politics by seeking to portray the Tories as spoilers.

Meanwhile, Lansley is seeking to lay down his own conditions by declaring that he will rejoin the talks only if a compulsory levy is ruled out.

Long-suffering voters’ heads will surely be spinning. They will conclude in despair that the two sides are as bad as each other in playing political games instead of attempting to resolve this issue — of such desperate concern to so many — in a mature and responsible manner.

For what everyone does agree is that the current situation with regard to care for the elderly is simply unsustainable. With people living ever longer and with increasing levels of frailty, there is just not enough money to look after them properly.

The social care provided to help old people stay in their own homes is often hopelessly inadequate; to pay for long-term residential care, people often have to sell their houses; and the standard of care in residential homes is often shamefully low.

The political row that has now erupted has all but obscured the merits or otherwise of the actual proposals being put forward.

The fact is that no one has come out of this uproar well. If Lansley’s behaviour was underhand and the Tories’ poster was grotesque, Labour’s ‘death tax’ idea is a shocker.

Nothing is certain in life, it is said, except death and taxes. One might add that a death tax is merely certain to create yet more injustice.

First, it would penalise those whose relatives have lived all their lives in their own homes — or, worse still, those who had actually been looking after them.

Second, it is particularly repellent to take money from people after they have died. It’s bad enough now if folk have to sell their homes to pay for their care. But this new proposal would be the equivalent of grave-robbing.

‘No taxation without representation,’ goes the old cry: maybe that should now be updated to ‘no taxation without respiration’.

Even more fundamental, there is absolutely no guarantee that this ‘death tax’ would actually be used for long-term care.

Bitter experience tells us that all such revenues simply vanish into the inexhaustible maw of the Treasury and the black holes of public expenditure into which it pours our money.

Achieving a consensus is a nice idea in theory. In practice, it founders on profound ideological divisions. For Labour, the solution to the care problem — like everything else — consists of top-down, state-controlled funding.

Yet that pattern of taking money in taxes and disbursing it through the Treasury has been tested to destruction in the NHS.

The truth is that we have to find new ways of delivering public services. People need to exercise the leverage of choice to ensure that standards are kept high; they also need to take responsibility for their own provision.

Because the sums involved in providing adequate long-term care are so immense, solutions need to be creative and flexible.

One of the problems contributing to this crisis is that fewer people are prepared to look after their aged relatives. Partly this is because so many women who would previously have done so now work; partly it is because family breakdown has eroded the bonds of love and duty.

One option ought to be to provide tax and other incentives and support to enable more people to look after their elderly relatives.

With increasing levels of frailty and degenerative disease, adequate support for carers is not a cheap option — and the number of people who need residential care will inevitably continue to grow. The fairest and most effective way of funding all this is through some kind of insurance.

The Tories have proposed a voluntary insurance premium on retirement of around £8,000 against the future risk of residential care. But without compulsion, it is unlikely that enough people will pay enough to meet the demand.

Solving the problem of funding long-term care is as complex and difficult as it is imperative.

Year after year, politicians have flinched from the inescapable fact that if high-quality care is to be provided for an ageing population, people are going to have to dig deep into their pockets.

Politicians need to treat the public like adults over this. But first they have to stop playing puerile games themselves.

by Melanie Phillips at February 15, 2010 06:47 AM

Imagine an evil corporation; let us call it Megagreed plc. A worker with a fine and principled record speaks out about its directors associating with men who propagate a criminal ideology that has led to the denial of rights to millions in poor countries. Far from listening to her wise objections, Megagreed’s bosses suspend her for exercising her right to free speech on matters of public importance; it is a very evil corporation as I said. Our brave whistleblower tours the streets looking for a human rights lawyer to represent her. But none will because they are all so frightened of incurring the wrath of Megagreed plc they would rather allow an injustice to pass than run the risk of taking up her cause.

Once men and women suffering at the hands of evil corporations like Megagreed could have turned to Amensty International for help. Our heroine has been punished for speaking out, she is being denied the basic right to legal representation, surely Amnesty will act as a court of final appeal and give her a hearing? But our heroine can’t turn to Amnesty because in this instance Amnesty International IS the evil corporation.

Read the whole thing

by Nick Cohen at February 14, 2010 12:31 PM

Torture is wrong because… The holding of prisoners of conscience is wrong because… The oppression of women is wrong because… If you finish these sentences with anything other than …because it violates universal human rights, you leave yourself wide open to attack by your opponents.

Although I am sure that Britain is a happier country than Saudi Arabia and that a sensible person would rather live in France than Cuba, the case for basing societies on liberties is not a utilitarian one. Listen to the current debate on rights, however, and you will find that virtually everyone involved pretends that we can enjoy them without paying a price; that a cost-benefit analysis will always show gain without pain.

On the face of it, the Court of Appeal upheld universal human rights when it decided to release a summary of US intelligence that showed American interrogators had shackled Binyam Mohamed, a suspected supporter of the Taliban, and subjected him to sleep deprivation. But a closer examination shows that the judges did not say that Mohamed was entitled to evidence that supported his allegation that MI5 was complicit in his mistreatment, regardless of the consequences for the relationship between the British and US intelligence services.
Read the whole thing

by Nick Cohen at February 14, 2010 11:31 AM

Andrew MacKay's decision to jump ship to the corporate sector has made Cameron's anti-cronyism stance look ridiculous Published on the Guardian's website...

February 11, 2010 09:06 AM